Your Mind Is Not Your Friend: Personal Transformation and the Leader Who Listens with Dr. Rand Harrington

Rand Harrington did not arrive at school leadership through a conventional path. He earned a PhD in physics, taught Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, and walked from Mexico to Canada at 18. Each experience cracked something open. By the time he took his first headship at Kent Denver School, he had a vision and the confidence to push it. What he lacked was the capacity to listen.

Between headships, he sold his house, bought a sprinter van, and drove across the country for a year. Every day, his wife Chris asked him the same question: how do you want to show up differently? That question changed everything. When he arrived at the American Embassy School of New Delhi in 2024, he showed up asking what the community needed rather than what he planned to deliver.

The shift from "I have the answer" to "I have a question" is not just a leadership posture. Harrington argues it is only possible for leaders who have been through genuine personal transformation themselves.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Evolution Stories by Middle States. This interview series is devoted to teaching you how to lead change in education. We're here because facilitating change in schools has never been harder or more important. So this is your place to learn from those who are leading the way. Okay, welcome back everybody. My name is Christian Talbot. I'm the president of the Middle States Association, and I am thrilled to welcome today's guest to Evolution Stories, Rand Harrington. Rand is the current head of school at the American Embassy School of New Delhi. He's been a head of school before. He's a longtime educator and one of the very few people I've ever heard of who has taught from middle school all the way through university. He has a PhD in physics. We're going to talk a little bit about the monks in a bit. And one of the reasons why I wanted to talk with Rand about his work in leading change in schools is because he is an atypical thinker. And I really value the perspectives that he brings that are unconventional. So I think we're going to learn a lot from this conversation. So Rand, thanks for being here. Thanks, Christian. So I normally start with um asking about how someone became interested in leading change. But with you, I want to start in a very different place because I I know that you have uh worked with the monks in uh Nepal. And um just tell us a little bit about that experience. Like how did how did it come to be?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, it was actually it wasn't Nepal, it was actually northern India. Okay. So where the Dalai Dalai Lama lives. And there are six or seven Tibetan children village schools, seven schools where orphans from Tibet come over and they're trying to maintain the Tibetan culture. So they teach in Tibetan and they maintain sort of uh the traditions. And um I was uh you asked this question how it came. It's to unpack that may take a while, but I'll I'll try to do the short version. I had been at the University of Washington and taught, developed materials called Physics by Inquiry for Elementary School teachers. And then I'd left, graduated, was teaching uh at the University of Maine, and literally was in a in an airport transitioning, and I ran into this old friend of mine, Stamatis Bokos, who was a a Greek physics professor, and he he caught my eye and he's like, ran. He goes, uh, I just got back from northern India. Do you want to go, do you want to go teach physics to monks? I'm like, wait, wait, slow down, Stadas. What are you talking about? And he said, Well, the the Dalai Lama had decided, had been doing these mind life conferences where they bring Western scientists and um high-level Tibetan monks together to talk about cosmology and the nature of the universe and so forth. And he'd done that for a long time, in small groups, always private. And the Dalai Lama realized at some point that he felt the monks didn't have enough sort of basic understanding of Western science to ask good questions. So he decided he wanted to interject Western science into the basic monastic education of the monks. So he sent his right-hand person, this guy named Ancock Remboche, uh, to the US with his entourage. And the tough part of finding the right sort of curriculum and instruction was that the monks are uh incredibly smart with about a fifth grade education. And so, you know, a a typical sort of dumbed down sort of elementary school physical science, that that wasn't gonna work. Yet they didn't have sort of the mathematics to do something more advanced. Uh, but they do learn in a particular way, and uh they they learn a lot by argumentation. And so Ancock had heard about this physics by inquiry, which was a particular teaching method that developed at the University of Washington, where we'd have four teachers sit around a whiteboard basically, and construct knowledge through discourse, basically, right? And and experimentation and observation and and develop basically it was I the idea was to develop fundamental understanding so that the elementary school teachers sort of own these concepts in a much deeper, deeper way. And once they discovered that, they said, Oh, this is perfect for the monks. And so Stomatas in this airport's like, hey Rand, they're gonna use your curriculum, you know, next year and in Dharm Salah, you should go and teach it, right, and be part of that. Uh and I was just like basically dumbfounded. I'm like, really? This is like crazy. Of course I'm gonna go. Uh and so uh went to before we went, went to the Mind Life Conference in it was in Boston at the time, got to meet the Dalai Lama, we got to meet Hancock Rempochet, and then we went, I went to uh the TCV school, which is where the monks were having their instruction, about 70 monks, and we had uh there's probably seven or eight uh professors there. Uh a couple of us were physics guys, a couple of math guys from Cornell. They do math in the morning, we do physics in the afternoon, sort of trade off, and uh it was incredible. And so we did, I had written this module on electric, electric charge, which is a little bit action at a distance stuff, you know, static electricity and that kind of stuff. And then we also did uh sort of this mind-blowing module that my colleague had developed on special relativity uh with monks. It was incre it was incredible. This is not the theme of your podcast. If it was, we could talk for another couple hours, and I'll tell you about all the things I learned and all the experiences that I that I that I had with that. But it was the most deliberate teaching I've ever done because we weren't we worked with an interpreter. And so the monks would be around the whiteboards, we would do a reflective toss or a question, it would get translated, the monks would talk about it, and then they'd draw. We used a lot of drawing because that was sort of transends language, you can draw pictures, and then and then they would answer the question, come back to the translator, they translated, come back to us. So every time I asked a question, I had this incredible wait time. And we always tell our teachers, yeah, you need some more wait time. I don't know how many times have you been in a classroom with teachers, any questions? Do you understand everything? Nope, nope, okay, let's go. You know, uh sort of fair spuler day off kind of teaching, right? That we saw. So I had this built-in really long you know wait time, and it allowed me to process in a way that I hadn't been deliberate about processing my teaching before and really reflected about what's what's the next question I want to ask, and how do I want to frame it? What's what you know, what's going to get at the real essence of what we're doing? Um, and and that kind of long reflection time was very transformative for me. It was really, really quite, quite interesting.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

What what would be an example of of a question that they would pose to you as opposed to the questions you would pose to them?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Well, we we it was funny, we would they're the superheroes of focus, right? So they were on the floor, they were all the furniture because they it was uncomfortable for them. They sit on the floor, these whiteboards, and we would go for four hours in the morning, four hours in the afternoon with tea breaks. Like eight hours, solid, right? And they were like right there. And if you said something that wasn't quite right, they caught it right away. It's like, all right, we're gonna deal with this. And then we would have dinner, and then after dinner, we would have a set, it's a really interesting session where during lunch, we had lunch with Ancock membership, and we'd come up with a topic, and then at night we'd have um, we'd throw this topic out, and then the monks would talk about it, and then we would talk about it, and then we'd have this conversation about some some topic and a lot of interesting uh topics. They wanted one of the things that was really interesting, we wanted they wanted to understand basic Western science. Like, how's this work? So you said, Oh, we're gonna teach them control variables, right? So this is how it works. You know, you you have all these variables and you and you keep them all the same, and you change one and you look for cause and effect over here, and they like they're looking at it, and then they start giggling, right? They're sort of laughing. Basically, they're in in Tibetan, I'm sure they're going, who's gonna tell them? That that's not how the world works. That's how the world works. The world is completely interconnected. You may you may think you're controlling variables, but everything's connected to everything else. You're just fooling yourself. They just couldn't believe that that's what we were trying to do. Yeah, um, but they I had the the most the craziest question I ever had. We were doing special relativity, and you have to understand light, and you have to understand the fact that light takes time to go from one place to another, which is a hard concept. That's weird. So we're talking about how light from the sun takes about 11 minutes to get to your eye. And uh we had a tea break, and this monk comes out to me and he had written some questions, and we had the interpreter come over. He knew a little bit of English, and he says, he says, uh Dr. Harrington, he says, uh, what's the difference between sunlight, insect light, and human light? And the look on my face was about what yours is. I was like, I don't understand the question. So I asked the interior, I go, what I I really don't understand what the question is. So then he turned back to the monk and they had some conversation, like they're chatting chat. And then the the translator turns back to me. We're using actually science teachers from the school was doing the translation. And he said, Well, this is what he's asking the word light from a cultural like perspective is synonymous in their sort of language interpretation of sort of consciousness. So human consciousness, light comes from your eyes and it goes out and it and it gives that cup meaning. Your mind gives that cup, it's a cup only because the mind says it's a cup. And that light is basically emanating from your brain through your eyes this way. I did all this research on misconceptions in science with little kids. You know, we do interviews and so forth, and that is exactly, and they didn't use the word consciousness, but if you ask little kids to draw the path of light, they often draw it from the eyes, not from the object to your eye, but from the eye to the object.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

And if you go look at the old, the early Superman cartoons, X-ray vision, where's the light come from? The eyes you go, right? It goes that way. Right. It doesn't come this way, right? And so the monks are doing the same thing. I'm saying light's going this way. So they're thinking about this light in such a different way.

SPEAKER_03 10:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

And suddenly I'm talking about light coming from the sun. And the monk's like, wow, that doesn't make any sense. Does the sun have consciousness? Like, what's that about? You know? And so that was the question. Right. It's like sunlight, human light, insect light? Like, what are these different things? You didn't understand his question, but he didn't understand your question. Yeah, absolutely. So uh so you asked, I mean, there's one example of a question that they asked us that gave me insight into how they were thinking about the world in a way that was so different than how I was thinking about the world. You know, it's not that, and we were doing I again at the University of Washington, we were doing a lot of research on how kids and adults think about the world. So I was used to this on some level, that even, yes, I mean, that's the extreme case of a Tibetan monk and a Western scientist, but there are a lot of people that have really different ideas about how the world works. And when you're not aware of that and you're teaching, and I mean, I had similar conversations with high school, even college students learning physics, where I was like, oh, that's how you're thinking about it. I used to do this research on electric charge, right? So there's two types of charge, negative and positive, right? I don't want to get too into a science lesson here. Uh and so we and we would do this, these experiments, you do these observations, right? And so um one of the things that happens is charged objects always attract neutral objects. And we established that something was neutral, or we do the experiment, there's no charge, so forth. And then that somewhere, I don't want to get again too detailed, go down a rabbit hole here, but the students would continually go. After we established that these objects were neutral, they would go, so those objects are uh charged, they're they're negative. I go, no, there's a neutral. I we just we just established it. Yeah, they're neutral, negative. I'm like, what do you mean? And they go, well, doesn't negative mean no? And positive means yes, right? Right. So instead of seeing positive and negative as two different types of charge, positive was it's charged, negative is it's not charged. Not charged. But it took me so long, and I didn't even discover it until I've been doing these individual interviews with kids about their ideas about charge, that it suddenly that that came to light. And I'm thinking, man, a classroom teacher has no chance of teaching these kids anything if they don't understand that the language gets in the way of how people uh converse. Yeah, but uh again, we could talk for hours on this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yeah, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull out two things that I hope we'll come back to. Well, who knows? But um I am gonna ask you a question in a moment about like how did you first realize you want to change schools or lead change in schools as opposed to just you know keeping the trains running on time. But the two there's two things that you said here that I think are super interesting. One is I I suspect that you had some sort of reaction to the monks when they were giggling about this misconception that we can't control one variable, yeah. Um, because you know, change in schools is like a multi-variable example of a complex dynamic system. Um and uh and this this idea of of misconceptions, actually I'm gonna I'm gonna um maybe be slightly more agnostic about it and just say that when one person's using a word one way and another person's using the same exact word a slightly different way, but neither party is aware of it, right? There can be all good intentions. Yeah. Um and I'm thinking specifically of a board of trustees at a head of school, to be perfectly frank. Um where both parties can be bringing total goodwill to the conversation and yet be looking at totally divergent realities. Absolutely.

unknown 15:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yeah. And I I wouldn't, and I would probably in this day and age wouldn't even use the word misconception anymore. I would say alternative conception. And and one of the things, and this is this is a truism from quantum mechanics that uh hit me really strongly just a couple years ago. Uh, and particularly when we're dealing with all the sort of divisive political talk in our countries right now. And this is a true thing in quantum mechanics. Two people can have really opposing views of even a physical object or something how it works, and they can both be correct. Right? So because they have different views that are incompatible doesn't mean that one's right and the other's wrong. And we jump to that all the time. We say, well, I'm right, you're wrong. It's like, well, I could be right. And guess what? You could be right too. Even though our ideas are incompatible, we can still both be correct. Right. And uh, I mean, there's much more interesting, I think, complex evidence for this. But the simple one that they do teach, sort of, in some schools, is is wave-particle duality, right? You see it as a particle, I see it as a wave, those are incompatible. Guess what? They're both true, right? Right. Um, and so I think there are lessons in physics about how the world works, if you look really deeply, that can give us uh an understanding of how we interact as human beings and how um how we construct knowledge and how we construct our realities in ways that uh is both terrifying and exciting.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yeah. It reminds me of those those memes from a few years ago of you know things online is like, is the dress blue or is it green? It's like, well, it actually just depends. It depends. Uh it's both. Well, that's right. Yeah. So um, I mean, you had such an interesting career in schools. Uh I'm curious when you think about your desire to create change either from one state to another state within the school that you're at, or um, you know, just sort of yeah, any form of change um within a school, is that something that you you entered the profession with a hunger to do? Is it something that that came to you later? Does it start even you know earlier in your like you were always creating change when you were a little kid? Like what what's the what's the origin story there?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

I try to say I think I believe this pretty strongly. I think any leader who wants to navigate change with an institution is better served if they themselves have been through a lot of personal change themselves and are still embracing personal change, personal growth.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

I totally agree with that.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Yeah. I totally agree with that. And and we don't talk about that enough. I've been through a lot of change, personal change in my life. And I think I mentioned this to you back in Turkey, yeah, when when um I don't talk about this very often, my first wife literally died in my arms. Well, that's a change. And and I also found out all right, somebody gave me this advice years ago, and I don't know who it was, but in reflection, I'm thinking I've kind of lived my life by this piece of advice, more or less. And that is this that your mind is not your friend. Really? Your mind tells you you have all these limitations that you don't have, and it keeps you from doing stuff, right? And so you you basically to grow in life, you gotta find the hardest, most suffering, difficult thing that you can find, and go after that. And if you do that, then your life's gonna be interesting, and you'll discover your capacity, which is far more than what your brain will tell you. Uh when I left high school, I I walked from Mexico to Canada. It was five and a half months on a trail. A lot of talk about a silent retreat, a lot a lot of time to myself as an 18-year-old.

SPEAKER_03 19:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Uh and why did I do that? It was just a hard thing to do that I didn't know if I could do it. And I'm like, all right, let's see if I can do that. Right? Uh climbing mountains was that way for me. Right. Um push myself, put myself in situations that literally I didn't know if I was gonna live. Uh take risks and then push past the big the point where I thought it was a point of no return, or at least it was the maximum that I that I thought I could do, go past that and realize that wasn't the maximum. There's a lot more there that you can get through. I was on um did a new climbing route on a beautiful mountain in the Himalayas called Amadablan and uh with two friends of mine. One was um Iranian and the other was Basque. Right. And um they they're great, great guys, right? And um Martin, the Basque guy, was the first they call him the first Spaniard to climb Everest, but when they call him a Spaniard, he's kind of mad because he's Basque. Yeah, he's Basque, yeah. And so we climbed this mountain. We found a uh got a permit for a new route on the mountain, never been done. So we're really high on this mountain. It was like super cold, vertical ice, and all this stuff. And uh took us five days. So we're you know, and we're on the last sort of leg up there on this, on this face, and we couldn't get quite through, and I was falling up, and I was trying to lower down to pendulum over this other cliff, and the anchor came out.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

And I fell 300 feet. And 300 feet. 300 feet because it was a it was a hundred it was a hundred and fifty-foot rope, 50 meter rope, and I was extended 50 meters up, and then I went 50 meters down the other way. Oh my god, right? Um, so 100 meters, and you know, tumbling past Martin and Human were like horrified thinking that I was gonna pull them off their anchors, we would have all been dead.

SPEAKER_03 21:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Um I had a lot of time to think in 300 feet of that tumbling. And it was a year after I lost my wife. So I I was okay with dying. I was like, all right, you know, this is okay. And uh I was sure that was it. But it wasn't. Robestown. Uh I was I was telling you earlier I've had these inflection points in my. That was an inflection point. It was like, okay, I guess I can rewire my brain now. Clean that one out. So what are we going to do with it? Let me over. Holy cow. So you start a new life. You start a new life and you think about things in a different way. And you reconstruct your brain in a different way. Yeah. And uh, I think I've had a number of moments in my life where I felt like I'm able to deconstruct how I was. I I get I get bored with my own brain. I get tired what about what my mind starts telling me. And you get into any job, and after a while, your your mind gets into these ruts, these patterns, right? They think about things in the same way, you know, and it's sort of reinforcing. Well, that worked, that time I'm gonna do it again. So you do the same thing, the same thing. And and eventually I just get bored with it, or I just get dissatisfied with how my brain is reacting to things. And the only way to shake it up, I don't really want to go fall another 300 feet and shake it up. But but I think there are things you can do, and changing your environment is certainly one one of those things that you do, and how you present yourself. Uh one of the most transformative events of my life was meeting my wife Chris, who you've met. And um I had when I met her, I'd been through a lot of of trauma, not only from losing my first wife, but also from you know, years and years of of search and rescue. We used to, we used to average about five fatalities a summer. Wow. Right. So I was putting a lot of dead people in body baits, right? And there were people that had fallen a long way, a lot of trauma. It was it it affected me. Yeah. And and she realized I had all this sort of trauma, which made you end up, you you put armor on, right? You put a lot of you have to, yeah. Yeah, you have all this armor on. And and I realized as well, and she was helping me realize that that if we were gonna have a relationship, I love this woman. I want to have a relationship with her. Um, that I was gonna have to do some deep work. I better do some deep personal change work to figure out how I'm gonna like shed enough armor to let this woman be close and for me to be close to her. Yeah. So I was motivated. Right. Another inflection point. All right, time to reinvent the brain. Like this brain is like doing some stuff that I don't like and really didn't like uh how I was in the world. And um so I I took that on, and uh I'll be honest, I'm still taking that on. I'm I'm still working on myself all the time.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

About how you do stuff. And so um I took a break. I said, all right, we're gonna a friend, my wife actually got me connected to the owner of the Stanley Hotel up in Essus Park. They're gonna build the Stanley Film Center and uh by the way, can you just tell the audience?

SPEAKER_01 25:03

For those who don't know about the Stanley Hotel.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Yeah, so the Stanley Hotel in Essis Park is where Stephen King slept and got the inspiration for the shining, right? And so the shining is modeled after that hotel. It wasn't filmed at that hotel, but that's where he was when he got his inspiration, and and it has its reputation of being haunted. Uh and and they sort of play it up, right, this whole thing. And so uh the owner of that hotel had uh with the state of Colorado had applied for this grant money to build the Stanley Film Center. And we won't go down this rabbit hole, but my uncle made horror movies in Hollywood in the 60s. He was this gay man from 1950, 1960, he made these B horror movies. They actually had Curtis Harrington Film Festivals. I mean, but it's just it was just weird. But I had that in my DNA, and he's like, oh Rand, you've run no, he didn't the John who owned the hotel had never run a nonprofit. He doesn't know anything about nonprofit. So this has to be a nonprofit, state money. Once you come up, you got a nonprofit, and your uncle made horror movies. I mean, you know, it's all gonna work. So uh we moved up to SC's Park and and did all this this work up there to try to get this thing uh off the ground. It didn't get funded. And so we're literally sitting around the campfire, um, and and my wife's like, you know, what's plan B here? What are we gonna do? Well, our next door neighbors were also at the campfire, right? Our next door neighbors, not right next, but they live in Ess Park, or and uh some of you in the international world may know these people. That was Mark Olfers, who's who was the director of the Office of Overseas Schools, and his wife Wendy lived in Ess Park and they became friends. And so Mark's like, you got out of education too early. I know the school in India, you love India, you've been you used to teach monks. My wife was an international rotary governor, done all the service work in India, you know. Um, would you guys be interested in maybe applying for that job? He goes, I have nothing to do with the hiring, but I'm just giving you, I'm just thinking that might be an interesting thing for you to do. And my first reaction was, that'd be awesome. And there's no way they'd ever hire me. I've never even taught overseas. I mean, there's just no way. If I was a board, international board, well, some some head of school from the U.S. had never even taught at international school. It's like, yeah, he doesn't know what he's getting into, right? So uh so I pushed back. Mark gently pushed back again, and my wife pushed. Chris is like, no, you should give it a go. So I threw my hat in the ring, and I got this interview, and then it was like, oh, we get a free trip to India on the finalist list. I was like, well, at least I get a free trip to India, it'll be fun. They're still not gonna hire me. Uh and then, of course, they offered me the job and uh another inflection point in my life. It's like, what are we gonna do? In a week, Chris and I decided we're gonna sell everything. Sold our house, sold our truck, rehomed our animals. We had horses and donkeys, you know, rescue donkeys. Uh my son took our dogs, and we we said we're gonna go to India. Now, the way these head of school jobs work, you get hired in like April and you don't go for another year and a half almost, or year and a quarter, right? You're like over a year out. So what are you gonna do for for a year? I wasn't employed. And uh so uh we we bought a sprinter van and we hit the road and we lived in a van for a year, driving around the US, seeing our kids, and uh And that rewired your brain again. Yeah, reading and and thinking about our lives, and I remember that I would say almost every day as we were camp somewhere driving, Chris would look at me and go, Rand, how are you gonna show up different in Delhi?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Really?

SPEAKER_00 29:03

Yeah. She pushed me. She's like, How do you want to show up? Right? And that was the topic of conversation for 12 months.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Let me ask you a follow-up question on that very specific thing. If Chris had not asked you that question, and maybe had she not asked you that question repeatedly, do you think you would have found yourself thinking about it anyway? Or do you think that her contribution in that sense changed what was going to come next for you?

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Absolutely, her contribution changed everything. Chris is people know Chris is a really loving person. I know her as a provocateur.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Right? I mean, she she provokes me all the time.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Because that's a that's a provocative question to ask over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Yeah. And she she saw something in me that she wanted, she was gonna push me. And she still pushes me, right? And and and so uh I was absolutely essential to have a a life partner who saw through my crap and pushed me, said, no, you you you you know, and she also witnessed as many uh significant others do their partner change when they get into these jobs.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

These jobs are crazy, they're all encompassing, you you know, hardly any time to breathe. And you start to develop this sort of another type of mask that you wear, right? You're wearing a a the head of school mask, and eventually you realize you're never taking that mask off. It's on all the time, even in your relationship with your spouse, and your spouse is like, Who is this? Yeah, like who's this person that I married? And they're they're they're all engrossed in this organization and and stressed out about stuff all the time and becoming distant and so forth. She didn't like that, right? And so the whole deal we made, if I was gonna take another job, especially ahead of school job, I was gonna have to, I'm I was gonna have to show up different. She wasn't gonna allow me to take a job and be the same way I was at Can Denver. Yeah, that wasn't gonna happen. And uh, and so uh I had this enormous gift of time. Most of us go from one job to the other, half the time they overlap a couple months, right? You're starting one job, you still got one foot and the other, and you don't have any time to sort of reflect and think about your future and again how you wanna how do you want to show up, right? Um and and how I had I had always been a curious kid, right? I I and my mother was deeply religious. So I would say the first part of my life it was it was finding truth through religion in some level, which totally failed me. I I it didn't work for me at all. So then it was finding truth through science, right? Physics, right? I'm gonna find truth, I'm gonna find truth through a study of physics and the natural world and how things how things work. And there's wonderful insights when you put that. But then in this last phase of my life, I think my life is these sort of three big phases, like religion and science and where I am now. I I think it I think it's really shifted is is truth through art and and emotion. That there's another truth, an embodied truth in our bodies, as the speaker was talking about today, which I strongly believe. Yeah, well, could you do that? Everything you said resonated with me. And uh, I mean her that speaker made my 17-hour trip from Delhi worth it today. Um, she's wonderful. I I really believe that I needed to to actually tap into the whether you call it the other half of the brain, or you're or you call it consciousness, or you call it the soul, or something else, and quiet my my mind, which is throughout my life has been a little too busy and and hasn't always served me. I used to script my speeches to the community. You know, you write them out, careful. It's over. And I and I developed this practice, uh, it's not meditation, but it's a way of of going into sort of a what some people call a no-mind state, right? So you you you you and and there's different ways of doing it. There's a book called Ottaumon, which I had read. It's like, all right, this is how you do it, there's some practices. And uh so I'd thought about what I wanted to say like at the beginning of school at Denver, or at uh AES. And and I'm like, no, I'm not gonna screw up. And as I walked up, like half hour before, I'm like, I'm gonna go in this no-mind state. And then I'm just gonna speak from my heart. And Chris was there. She almost started crying. She says, That's the best you've ever done. Ever.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

Did you feel the same way?

SPEAKER_00 34:11

Yeah, it was coming from it was natural, it came from a different uh place in me. A different kind of intelligence or consciousness. It wasn't my brain trying to you know make it make it all make it all right. And um and and all of this has been where the biggest change, if I had to answer the question, how did how did I show up differently? Is that it, Kent Denver? I showed up as a visionary, I'm gonna lead this school into you know better places. And uh at AES I showed up asking the question, what does this community need from me? And I'm gonna do a lot of listening.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Is it fair to say Ken Denver was, I have the answer, and I need to bring people to the answer? And AAS has been, I have a question.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a very nice way to frame it. And I still have questions every day. I've been there, I haven't been there that long. I'm still learning. I mean, there's so many layers to a school. Uh, and I and I hope people appreciate it, but I I I just think that schools have their own sort of DNA and and and they do need to get pushed. You know, I I am reminded of you know Henry Ford's quote. If I asked them what they wanted, they would have said, you know, stronger horses, right? So there has to be some nudging along the way of how to get how to get better and how to how to rethink things. But I'm going about it, I think, in a really different way. Um, and uh again, I'm doing a lot of a lot of listening and and trying to help people thrive, right? Mentoring, I'm really enjoying mentoring. Yeah, mentoring uh young school leaders that uh you know are ambitious and they want to do stuff, and uh but but they need help and just understanding uh how they the the gap is self-knowledge more than anything, right? The leaders that are that are that flounder and fail lack self-knowledge and they don't realize the gap between how they think they are and how people perceive them. Right. And so sometimes you need to put up a mirror and you need to like you know help people to understand, but you can't do that work unless you yourself are also doing that work all the time. Right. You always have to put up a mirror and say, Who am I? How am I in the world? Right. And and do I know uh are my actions consistent with my values or or not? And when your values start or your actions start to separate from your values, then you're done, from my point of view. That's when that's when it all falls apart. And a lot of us don't realize you you slip into that and you suddenly you wake up, you go, God, I've been doing all this stuff that actually is not consistent with my values, right? But other people see it right away, you know, they're gonna call you out on it. Yeah, and they're gonna go, yeah, this is a that's a crappy leader. This guy's not transparent. You say he's this and he's doing that, and I don't trust him anymore, and it's like everything falls apart. So if you're gonna build trust in an institution, you better be true to yourself first. Yeah. If you're true to yourself and transparent, people may not agree with you. That's okay. But you are who you are, yeah, you know, and you're transparent about it, um, then I think people will at least respect you, even if they disagree.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

I want to respond to something you said, uh, which is is painful for me to relive in my memory, but is is important for that reason to talk about it. When I was in my final year of my first headship, and in kind of directional ways, I would say, very similar to your headship at Ken Denver. I went to a school where I was supposed to be you know a visionary who had a you know there I saw a different future, and like by force of will was going to bring people in that direction. And that's not mostly what that community wanted. And um I learned that lesson the hard way over and over again. And in my last year there, one of the teachers, um, toward the end, I think it might have been like in my last couple of months, she said to me, Um, you know, when you started, you that summer before the school year began, you interviewed most of the faculty and the staff, and you asked us what we wanted to see. Um and I had the impression, she told me, that you already knew what you wanted to see.

SPEAKER_03 38:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

And she said, Is that true? And I said, No. I said, I was I was asking you because I really wanted to know. And and that was truthful, but it wasn't the whole truth. And it took me a long time to admit to myself. Because I when I told her that, I wasn't lying. Sure. But I was I was incapable of accessing another truth, which was, yeah, I also was bringing something to that.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

You had a vision. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, they hired you because you you had the potential. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Yeah, but um, but I but I I couldn't face, like you said, you know, hold the mirror up, and I couldn't face that at that time. It took me a while to see that. And um, part of what I I think is important about the conversation that we're having, and that I hope you know people who watch or listen to this will be thinking about is I I believe everything that you've said so far, and and I would go almost a step further and say, you cannot be a successful leader unless you you spot the things about yourself that you don't want to know. Because they're there, whether you like it or not. They are there. It's not like there's somebody out there who doesn't just doesn't have any flaws or weaknesses or shadow, right? Um, and so I think an essential task for us is to, however it happens, yeah, is to find that mirror or set of mirrors.

unknown 40:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

So that's one thing. I want to go back to something though that you said it's what Chris said to you over and over again. How do you want to show up differently? Yeah. And as you were telling that story, I was I was rightfully or wrongfully, I was connecting it to something you said even earlier, which was um that you had a series of experiences in your life where your mind was telling you this is the limit, and you had to push yourself beyond what your mind was telling you to know what you were capable of. And in some ways it felt like Chris was doing that. She was saying, I'm not going to let you settle for the version of yourself that you were, and therefore I'm going to keep asking you this question until you push past the limit. Um, is that also the role of the leader with faculty and staff?

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Yeah, I I think so. I mean, I think I think that's I think that's I think that's right. It's funny, just sitting here, I'm I'm now realizing I probably marry Chris because of that. I knew I knew she was gonna push me. Yeah. And and and I enjoy being pushed at some level. You have to be, everybody's different. And I'm finding, you know, there's a lot of fragile people. And certainly in the teaching profession, there's a there's a lot of teachers that are that are fragile on some level. And um and how do we how do we support and help those those those teachers and how you deal with them is uh and I'll tell you a story about this. Because you had asked, I think at some point I think it was in your script maybe, you asked the question, well, how is how has being trained as a scientist sort of impacted you as a leader? And I'll and I'll and I can share ways in which it was um a detriment. It was very difficult. In in the sciences, you you do research, you come up with a new idea, you gather evidence for it, and you present that evidence to the community. And the job of the community is to um is to break it, right? Really you throw you and you want to break it. He's like, all right, is this gonna hold up under scrutiny? Because the terrible theory of it doesn't. I mean, you we want I want you to find the the holes in this. I want you to challenge my evidence, I want you to try to repeat the experiment, I want you to throw rocks at it, whatever it is. And so you go to these the conferences is really the laying of ideas onto a table, depersonalize it, and go at it, right? All right, you can imagine taking a bunch of elementary school teachers and throwing putting the curriculum on a table in front of them that they've worked so hard on and put their life into it, and then do that process. Oh, that's a lot of tissues. That's a lot of that's a lot of tears. And I I I was like, I remember distinctly one one meeting in which I had to do a lot of self-reflection. I'm like, man, I hurt a lot of people's feelings in that meeting. I didn't mean to, yeah, but it but it was all depersonalized for me. It's like, all right, this is you know, does this work? This is and I looked on, you know, this this cocky young physics guy looked at the science curriculum and go, this is crap. Like that doesn't work. What are you doing that for? And uh I don't know, I don't think I was that harsh, but in the end it was like, I cannot go through a change process in the way that I was taught in the sciences. That's not gonna that's not gonna work. I'm not gonna end up with a better like in science, you end up with a better product if you break it apart. Here I was gonna end up losing my job probably. I mean I I just and so I had to s sit there and really think carefully about how we were gonna go about it. How do you how do you change curriculum like w and and teaching methods? Like what what levers do you have? And um they had done all this Atlas Rubicon curriculum mapping. Right, everybody put their curriculum out, and then we can look at it and talk about it. And and I realized that's probably the really the opposite of what we should be doing. That's probably the absolute wrong approach. And what we ended up doing is I said, uh, I had this science team because we were looking at our curriculum. Let's take uh a couple weeks. I want you to get on the internet, get on the phone, let's find the best, what you think are the best elementary school curriculum and best elementary school science teachers in the country. That's who are those? We should know that. All right, go to a conference and talk to people. And we came back, we said, Yeah, we found this guy who's doing this really interesting stuff, and this school's doing some interesting stuff. Let's go visit. Let's just go walk around. And you may walk around and go, we're doing that better than they're doing it. That's really confirming. Or, wow, that's an interesting, interesting idea. So we weren't putting their ideas on the table, we're putting somebody else's ideas on the table, which provided some little safer, some buffer. It was it was it was it was a safer change process for them. And they got in the end, they got really inspired. And it wasn't because anyone said what they're doing is crap, it was because they looked at it and go, we can I could do better. Because I've seen something now that is better. Right? I got exposed to a model, and then I think that developed into we used to do teacher grants where we would give groups of teachers money in the summer to do something really interesting in their career, but they wouldn't get paid until they shared it with everybody else. Because I wanted a way that we would highlight our best teachers. Because we spend all the time on the underperforming teachers, all the administrators are doing observations with every teacher they're trying to fire. Like, oh, I gotta do the paperwork, we're gonna observe, we're doing a performance thing. And the best teachers, like invisible, they're they're doing all this great work, but they're not getting any attention. So let's flip it, make the underperforming teachers basically irrelevant because now we're not paying any attention to them. And if they want attention, they know what they need to do because they saw that group of teachers who did this amazing thing in the summer and came back and presented to everyone, and now they're gonna transform their curriculum and do all this really cool stuff and implement it, and they presented it to everybody at the school, and so everybody got to see it. That was a culture shift, right? In terms of what do you what is it that you focus on? What do you what do you celebrate? Yeah, and if you're focusing all your time on dysfunction, you're gonna see a lot of dysfunction. Yeah, start focusing on the positive, on all the stuff that works, all the stuff that's great. Reward the great stuff, and then the other stuff kind of becomes irrelevant.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

Yeah, attention is a zero-sum resource, and if you give it to the wrong thing, you're not getting it back to use on something else.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

Absolutely. And that it also feeds into a theory of feedback. They say that if you point out what's wrong with an individual, right? I think the resources it's a pretty high number. 30, 40% of the time, their performance is gonna go down. Go down, yeah. Actually gets worse. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

And you need to, and you need to then reinforce positively like seven times as many.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Yeah, yeah. But it's not just finding what you like about them, it's telling them what you like. Yeah. Saying for me to when when you do this, yes, I thrive. Yeah. Do you know this? And what do I do that makes you thrive? Do you know how can I do more of that for you?

SPEAKER_01 47:43

The John Wooden technique on this?

SPEAKER_00 47:45

No, no. But I I I love John Wood. That was a basketball player. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Me too. And and so John Wooden, someone um actually a couple, a couple of researchers filmed his practices and they did qualitative coding of all of the words that he used. And roughly, I I I I'm probably getting the percentage like slightly wrong, but let's say like roughly 95% of the time, the words he used were value neutral words. They were purely descriptive of what was happening. Yeah. And so he would say, for example, you know, that they'd be practicing, he'd blow the whistle, and he'd say, the reason why that was a turnover is because you threw the ball with a baseball pass, but you should have used a bounce pass. Sure. Um, and he wasn't saying that was a good thing or a bad thing. He was just simply describing what happened. Yeah. And only maybe like 5% of the time would he praise or criticize. Yeah. Um and it was the the act of describing. Yeah, with accuracy that allowed people to.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

I think Kim Marshall says the same thing for these like many observations that they do in classrooms. Just be descriptive. Yeah. Teachers don't they can't see what's going on in their classroom. They're too in their head, they're thinking about what they're teaching, and they they don't they don't see the you know, this kid's heads on the table in the back and never even woke up, right? And there's just a gap in in how you see things.

SPEAKER_03 49:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

But but I do think it's really powerful that if you've got an underperforming teacher, that you sit in that classroom long enough that you find something that really worked with even with one kid. And you point out, you go, when you did that, did you see the eyes on that kid and how excited he was? Yeah. Can you do more of that? Yeah. Because that's what you need to do more of. Yeah. And if you don't tell people what you want more of, all you say is what you don't want, you're not gonna get anything. Right. You know, it doesn't work. Yeah. And so anyway, those are all good, good lessons for all of us.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

Also, the the idea of of incentivizing teachers to create the things you do want to see and then to showcase those things is a little bit like the Buckminster Fuller idea that you you're not gonna change the future by deconstructing the old things, you know, and turning it into something different. It's just build build the new thing. That's right. Build the new thing.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Well, this this is the interesting provocation today at this conference, right? Uh, this question of can we build our brains differently now? Because AI can take care of a bunch of stuff that's been occupying us for a long time. And uh and if AI can, if we can offload that stuff, instead of just getting lazy and dumb, can we expand our brains in maybe a different way? And it brings up to this, I think, this really interesting question about teachers and who needs to be in the teacher teaching profession. And is that going to dramatically change? Like, do we need to be recruiting a different kind of person to be a teacher when we're asking them to do this sort of human flourishing work? Right? That's a different skill set. Totally. And and and I think we need to start talking about teacher training, which is such a terrible phrase, right? Training of sound like we're training dogs or something, right? Uh, but that how can uh we find teachers that have been through experiences in which they've had to struggle and they learn from their own struggles and challenges. I love the conversation we had with Tim Stewart, right? And and how when he came to a school not speaking English, right, they put in a special inkling. But the struggle that that Tim went through was transformative for his life and how he became who he is today. And I think that's true of all of us. We we uh the it's through the struggles that that we become empathetic and we start understanding what other people are are going through. And and we and that knowledge from from you know what you might call post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress gets in our cells essentially, it's part of our body. Right. My wife always talks about the energy you bring into a room, right? And uh go you know, hide in the corner of a classroom and watch a teacher walk into a classroom in those first 30 seconds, you can almost predict how that classroom is gonna go. Right does the teacher bring good energy into that room and bring themselves in such a way that they're having an impact on every kid in that room from the get-go. Yeah, that is critical to what great teaching is. But we don't talk about that. We don't, I don't think, very much. And and and are we attracting people that do have good energy? Can we teach someone to have good energy? Like, can we teach someone how to to be well?

SPEAKER_01 52:55

What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 52:56

Is it possible? My wife would say yes, yeah. She actually is certified in this really interesting field called social artistry, uh, which is kind of about that. Yeah, you know, yeah, it's about how how you construct these these social interactions in a way that is I I know the um Priya Parker was speaking about the art of gathering, right? Yeah, that was a lot about, I mean, I think it resonated with Chris. She's like, oh yeah, she understands a lot. But social artistry is a really interesting framework that Chris actually taught in Kathmandu to to women and these small NGOs about how to how to sort of be in a room uh and how to how to bring certain kinds of energy into that room. Uh, it's fascinating, and it's a whole it opens up a whole new way of thinking about things beyond the focus that we always have on just cognition, yeah, which is what our schools have been around cognition. And uh AI is pretty good in that area. Right. You know, the three areas that you know AI is really good at math, reading, writing. I mean, that's that's our schools, right? So if AI does that really well, what are we gonna do? And what are we gonna teach, right? Uh, and how are we gonna be? Well, what AI is is actually not very good is analytical reasoning, is one of them. And and so how do we how do we really teach kids about analytical reasoning and how to take on really difficult things with others? Yeah. And that's the game right there. Yeah, exactly. Take on something really hard with some other people, and you're gonna learn a lot about yourself, a lot about other people, and you'll learn what your capacity is and what you're capable of, and how you're gonna add value to the world. Yeah, right. And those are all really important ideas that we need to be thinking about rather than, you know, can you can you do well on a test without using AI to cheat? It's like I mean it's like totally wrong question. Is that the right question we should be asking right now? It's like crazy. I agree with our speaker today. I just think we're at a really interesting point in our history where whether AI ushers in an era of being like the demise of human beings or the era of human flourishing will will depend on what educators do.

unknown 55:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:12

So just for the audience, you know, obviously we're in my hotel room here. This is the AIE conference um in Toronto, and the speaker, there's a couple speakers, the Parker, you know, opened up the conference, but the Ulika Hansen. Ulika Joshi Hansen is the who's who's the author of The Future of Smart, yeah, um, is the person that Brandon's specifically referring to. Someone's I just we just heard that talk, so it's like it's in my head, uh, and it just resonated.

SPEAKER_00 55:40

Everything she said resonated with me.

SPEAKER_01 55:41

So my last question brings us back to something you said toward the toward the beginning. Um and and I I don't know if I'm just asking you to say it in other words or to riff on it or what, but you'll you'll you'll whatever you're gonna do with it. And and uh the reason I want you to come back to this is because I had such a visceral affirmative response to it. And and it's this idea, and I'm gonna use my words, not yours. What I heard you say was was basically someone can't lead change in an institution if they have not committed to changing themselves and gone through and continue to go through a process of personal transformation.

unknown 56:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

Yeah, so say more.

SPEAKER_00 56:33

I believe that's true for teachers too, and not just leaders, for all of us. If you want to help somebody else, if we if we if you want to engage in teaching kids what some people call transformative learning or transcendent learning, this notion that a kid walks into a classroom thinking about the world in one way or feeling about the world in one way, and leaving thinking and feeling about the world in a different way. All right, that sort of openness to transformation. Then the teacher can only achieve that if they know for themselves when they they've been through they've been through it themselves, right? They they know what that what that takes. And that's the hardest thing in the world. Self-knowledge, they say, is one of the hardest things, but changing yourself is even harder, right? How do you how do you change how you know when's the last time you changed your mind about anything? You know, how do you how do you how do you do that? I I do th I do think that um I don't want to say it's hard to say this without sounding cliche or or at least being disingenuous, but I I I do think that growth comes hand in hand with I I want to say the words death and destruction, which is a little strong, but suffering, right? That we live in a world that that there there are there is this sort of yin yang of balancing things, right? And and you can't you can't just have joy all the time. I thought it was really interesting that that oops this woman, Priya who wrote The Art of Gathering, that her next book, I she said it's a secret, I can't tell people what it is. Uh but it's a book, I'll just say in general it's about conflict and the importance of conflict. Yeah. Right. Um and her background is in conflict resolution. Yeah, yeah. That conflict is really important to communities. Yeah. Right? And and and being able to have conflict as she described, and being able to say, ouch, and not burn the house down. But I do think our best teachers are teachers that have experienced suffering. Loss in some way. There was an interesting exercise in this conference uh at the beginning, where there was a question about when have you experienced the most freedom or flourishing, you know, when have you been off through and um we had to pair up and and this fellow I paired up with I can't remember his name, nice guy. And uh he said um he felt most free after he'd been suffering. And then we talked, I said, Oh, that's interesting. I said, Yeah, I think I felt the most free after a big loss. When you lose something and suddenly you've you've shed a part of yourself and now your mind is open to doing something different. And if you don't suffer loss or you don't suffer at all, you you kind of get cozy with your mind and there's no reason to change. You know, you get it's it's too easy. So you need a little dysfunction in your life, I think, to change, which means you you get used to dysfunction, you don't catastrophize it. And so when you see it in the classroom, a kid who's suffering, there's some dysfunction, right? It's okay, you know, you're just like, you know, I can handle this. You know, the kid's gonna be all right. He's he's he's frustrated, but real learning is frustrating and we have to develop in ourselves and our kids more a a greater sense of resiliency and be able to manage those moments because they're precious. Yeah, they're the moments that are gonna help us grow.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

To really understand that, I don't think you understand it unless you've done it yourself. That's that's the bottom. I think that's the question you were asking. It is. Yeah. It is, and um and it's not I want to take everybody from the let's take everybody in the conference and and let's go suffer for the afternoon. Yeah, that's not the point. But but I but I do think if you're honest with yourself that the world presents plenty of challenges.

unknown 1:01:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:00

And if you we have so much armor on, sometimes we don't let ourselves suffer. Yeah. So let yourself suffer a little bit. Take in that feelings that you're having, that you're frustrated with the world and this, that, and the other thing, but then do something with it.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:13

You know. Maybe one way to think about it is that real growth is on is always on the other side of a threshold. And that to cross the threshold you can't cross a threshold without some degree of suffering or pain or loss.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

Absolutely. Yeah. This is what you know, Joseph Campbell, you know, hero's journey, right? Yeah. You gotta be in the belly of the wheel for a while. Yeah before you bring the riches back.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:37

And uh, and that whole notion of crossing the threshold. I love the hero's journey. I used to say that story to all the seniors, right, as they're leaving. Um, but I but I think we're all our in our hero's journey somewhere. And part of that journey is is uh struggle and suffering, and a lot of and some of that journey is asking for help, you know, getting a mentor. Uh and um some of that uh journey is uh bringing the riches back. Yeah. Back home. Yeah, yeah. At the end of it, right? After you've done all that stuff. That's a great place to thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:11

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.